principal confidant in receiving these bribes was Mr.
Croftes, who was a principal person in this Board of Revenue, and whom
he had made to swear not to take bribes: he is the confidant, and the
very receiver, as we shall prove to your Lordships. What will your
Lordships think of his affirming and averring a direct falsehood, that
he did it to conceal it from these men, when one of them was his
principal confidant and agent in the transaction? What will you think of
his being more than ordinarily cautious to avoid the suspicion of it? He
ought to have avoided the crime, and the suspicion would take care of
itself.

"For these reasons," he says, "I caused it to be transported immediately
to the treasury. There I well knew, Sir, it could not be received,
without being passed to some credit; and this could only be done by
entering it as a loan or as a deposit. The first was the least liable to
reflection, and therefore I had obviously recourse to it. Why the
second sum was entered as a deposit I am utterly ignorant. Possibly it
was done without any special direction from me; possibly because it was
the simplest mode of entry, and therefore preferred, as the transaction
itself did not require concealment, having been already avowed."

My Lords, in fact, every word of this is either false or groundless: it
is completely fallacious in every part. The first sum, he says, was
entered as a loan, the second as a deposit. Why was this done? Because,
when you enter moneys of this kind, you must enter them under some name,
some head of account; "and I entered them," he says, "under these,
because otherwise there was no entering them at all." Is this true? Will
he stick to this? I shall desire to know from his learned counsel, some
time or other, whether that is a point he will take issue upon. Your
Lordships will see there were other bribes of his which he brought under
a regular official head, namely, _durbar charges_; and there is no
reason why he should not have brought these under the same head.
Therefore what he says, that there is no other way of entering them but
as loans and deposits, is not true. He next says, that in the second sum
there was no reason for concealment, because it was avowed. But that
false deposit was as much concealment as the false loan, for he entered
that money as his own; whereas, when he had a mind to carry any money to
the Company's account, he knew how to do it, for he had been accustomed
to enter